Touchstone 1 - Stray

exactly what she should, she kept looking really excited the entire time.
    We started in Test Room One to go through the combat talents. In terms of sheer fire power Third Squad is nothing compared to Eighth, but they’re not shabby either. We moved on to testing sights next. There’s six sorts of sights: Combat, Path, Gate, Symbol, Place and ‘Sight Sight’, which is two different words, but both mean sight. Third Squad has all but ‘Sight Sight’, which is really rare and is apparently something to do with divining the ‘nature of things’. According to Eeli, the bluesuit who came down in person to look at me, Selkie, has Sight Sight and so does Ruuel. Eeli is a great source of information. I don’t even have to ask her questions.
    I could tell Taarel’s squad really adores their captain, the way First Squad respects Maze, but with an extra level of worship. She’s definitely one of those people like HM, a tiny sun, though she leaves HM in the shade. She has the strongest Ena manipulation talent, and when we went into the Ena to test my enhancement on her talents, she was able to partially close one of the gates. She has a calm reserve, but I can really picture her giving a Battle of Agincourt type of speech, inspiring everyone around her to follow and admire and commit great acts of nobility.
    Reading back that last paragraph, it sounds like I have the hots for Taarel. Funny. I guess she impressed me. This whole entry is really confused and out of order and I think that’s because of Eeli’s gossip and because Taarel really reminds me of Ruuel. I haven’t had any reason to write about him, but I’ve developed a tendency to look closely at any squad I happen to see, hoping it might be Fourth. I think about him a lot more than I’ve written about.
    And it occurred to me, while I was watching Taarel and being impressed and seeing Ruuel in the shape of her eyes, that I might be on second level monitoring for the rest of my life. No wonder none of the Setari want to have informal conversations with me.
    Thursday, February 21
    Let’s try that again – Third Squad
    Yesterday’s entry reads as amazingly garbled. The shorter and less confused version is that Eeli collected me and we went to Test Room One. We tested combat skills and Combat Sight and then went to a smaller room where we tested Symbol and Place Sight. Then we went into the Ena and tested Path Sight, Gate Sight, and Ena manipulation. The fact that, enhanced, Taarel was able to partially close a small gate was a fairly major thing apparently. There’s a few gates in very inconvenient spots and, though it sounds like it would take a lot of sessions to do it, I had a strong impression that I’ll be assigned to Third Squad at some point in the future to go and close one or two that they really don’t want open.
    Path Sight is a tracking ability: not seeing footprints, but knowing the direction of something. Gate Sight allows you to tell how long a gate will remain open. Place Sight is a very vague and all-encompassing sight that lets you see invisible things including things like auras, “the remnants of touch”, whatever that means, or the way things used to look. Sometimes Place Sight will even show stickies. It’s considered a difficult Sight to cope with: painful, with bonus nightmares. Symbol Sight is a “specific interpretative” ability that reminds me of my injected language: see a word, and have an impression of meaning, while ‘Sight Sight’ is a vaguer but more profound comprehension. They’re all called ‘Sight’, but it’s really more ‘awareness’. Combat Sight, for instance, means you’re aware of creatures around you, even if they’re behind walls, and gives you a strong advantage when trying to anticipate movement and attack. Both Third and Fourth Squad are Sight based exploration squads with duties focused around establishing new paths through the spaces to ‘hot spots’ where Ionoth are infesting Tare’s near-space and real-space. But also trying to find and investigate the Ddura and the Pillars, and even to do investigative work for real-space crimes (psychic detectives!).
    I suppose I must have some form of Path Sight, to have found my way to Earth’s near-space, although Eeli made it very clear that what I did was way outside their idea of the talent. Back when I first returned, and was in medical again, their attempts to test me for Path Sight were a complete failure, and I think they’re a little